Music
Nick Cave has offered his blunt thoughts on A.I.
The Australian songwriter sat down with Amanda Petrusich for a New Yorker profile, a lengthy piece touching on grief, creativity, touring, and a lot more besides. It’s well worth seeking out – and can be found in full here – but thought it worth highlighting Nick Cave’s thoughts on A.I.
A recent letter to his Red Hand Files site found a fan sharing a faux-Cave lyric constructed via ChatGPT. Asked for his thoughts, Nick Cave said simply: “this song sucks”.
Probed on this, the songwriter responded with a lengthy, highly eloquent treatise on the nature of art, and why music – and creativity more generally – belongs to a realm of the divine.
“My objection is not with A.I. in general,” he said. “For better or for worse, we are inextricably immersed in A.I. It is more a kind of sad, disappointed feeling that there are smart people out there that actually think the artistic act is so mundane that it can be replicated by a machine. I find that insulting.”
“There’s no earthly reason why we need to invent a technology that can mimic this most beautiful and mysterious creative act. Particularly writing a song. The thing about writing a good song is that it tells you something about yourself you didn’t already know. That’s the thing. You can’t mimic that. The good song is always rushing forward. It annihilates, to some degree, the songs that you’d previously written, because you are moving forward all the time. That’s what the creative impulse is—it’s both creative and destructive and is always one step ahead of you.”
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“These impulses can’t be replicated by a machine,” Nick Cave said of A.I “Maybe A.I. can make a song that’s indistinguishable from what I can do. Maybe even a better song. But, to me, that doesn’t matter—that’s not what art is. Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human.”
“A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone.”
Nick Cave’s book Faith, Hope & Carnage is out now.
